The Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Bucs and Oakland Raiders are in.
The Buffalo Bills, along with at least four other National Football League teams, are out.
The issue is the NFL’s newly revised blackout policy, which allows teams to avoid local television blackouts if at least 85 percent of their nonpremium seats are sold for any game.
For most NFL teams, especially those that have no trouble selling out their stadiums every week, blackouts aren’t an issue.
But they’re a huge issue for Buffalo and for many of the league’s other smaller-market teams.
The new policy, answering a plea for eased blackout policies for games played in stadiums that are largely publicly financed, has not become the panacea that many fans were seeking. Besides the Bills, the Cleveland Browns, the Indianapolis Colts, the Jacksonville Jaguars and the San Diego Chargers all have opted out of the relaxed blackout policy, according to various media reports.
It has become a complex issue – and a potential public-relations eyesore – for many smaller-market teams. So much so that most teams opting out of the policy have tried to keep their intentions low-key, often avoiding news conferences on the issue.
One month ago, the Bills revealed that they are opting out of the policy.
“We are a volume-based business, and for us to be successful, we need to keep our ticket prices low and sell a greater number of tickets,” Bills Chief Executive Officer Russ Brandon told The Buffalo News at the time.
While that decision has created a bit of an uproar from local fans, the issue is so complicated that the area’s most visible fan advocate supports the team’s action.
“I completely understand the Bills’ decision, and I think they made the absolutely right choice,” said Matt Sabuda, president of the Buffalo Fan Alliance. “The way this policy was written, it was a lose-lose for the Buffalo Bills.”
That’s because the devil was in the details of the policy.
Under the new policy, each NFL team had to decide whether to opt in or out for the whole season. Teams adopting the policy could choose any percentage between 85 and 100.
If the Bills had chosen the 85 percent threshold, the blackout would have been lifted if the team sold at least 51,000 nonpremium tickets for any game; that’s 85 percent of the stadium’s approximately 60,000 nonpremium seats.
But here’s the drawback. By opting in, the Bills would have had to pay a substantially higher percentage of gate receipts for every home game into a league-wide revenue fund for every ticket above the 51,000 figure. The Bills would have had to pay 50 percent, rather than 34 percent, of such receipts to the league.
A sold-out game would have cost the team about $90,000 per game.
That’s only one side of Sabuda’s “lose-lose” situation.
The policy also wouldn’t have prevented blackouts for tough-to-sell late-season games in Ralph Wilson Stadium, especially when the winter wind is howling and the Bills could be out of playoff contention.
Only one of the Bills’ last six blacked-out home games would have reached the 85 percent threshold, and most of those games fell far below that figure, team officials have said.
So the Bills and their fans would have been penalized both by the early-season sellouts and by the possible blackouts of late-season games.
“It’s easy for fans to jump to the conclusion that this is an anti-fan decision,” Sabuda said of the Bills’ announcement. “But the Bills made the right call.”
Brandon noted Monday that the new policy, if adopted by the Bills, would have forced the team to give back 16 percent of any ticket revenue above the 51,000-ticket mark for any game.
“We believe that we have to roll up our sleeves and try to sell every ticket in the building,” Brandon added. “That’s how we have gone about it in the past, with excellent success, and that’s how we will go about it in the future.”
Sabuda still believes there’s a positive aspect to the new rule for the local team. He calls it “ticket transparency.”
“Even though the Bills chose not to opt in, the fact that other teams are opting in is going to position the Bills as a fan-driven team,” he said. “It’s going to show how Buffalo stacks up well against other markets like Miami, Tampa Bay and Oakland.”
So why does Buffalo opt out, while Miami opts in?
“The thought process of why we’re doing it is pretty basic; it’s consistent with our philosophy over the last three years and probably longer, which is to do everything possible we can to keep the games available on local television,” Dolphins CEO Mike Dee told www.miamidolphinswebsite.com.
Miami has had 109 consecutive regular-season games aired on local television since October 1998. Last year, according to the team website, the Dolphins, along with broadcast partners and sponsors, bought up thousands of tickets for most home games to get them on TV.
Other sources said the Dolphins have been buying up large numbers of tickets for years.
Sabuda, from the Fan Alliance, isn’t the only person critical of the new policy’s details.
A leading national blog about the NFL, profootballtalk.com, had a similar view.
“The NFL recently responded to mounting political pressure regarding the outdated blackout rule by punting the hot potato to the teams," Mike Florio wrote on that website. “On the surface, there was cause for celebration."
But while the new policy would allow teams to televise games if 85 percent of the tickets were sold, Florio added, “The fine print, in a word, sucks.”
The NFL has allowed each team to decide how to announce whether it’s adopting the relaxed blackout policy.
In a brief email interview Monday, Brian McCarthy, the league’s vice president of corporate communications, said he couldn’t give the vote total from the teams’ adopting the new policy in May. But the vote would have required a three-fourths majority, so at least 24 of the 32 teams voted for it.

email: gwarner@buffnews.com